CANASA Calls for More Time on AMPS

Articles

Wednesday, 18 January 2006 16:42

January 18, 2006 ó It is inevitable that Canada's Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) will disappear, but it is when it will cease to exist is the real concern of CANASA.

AMPS refers to analogue cellular telephone networks supporting an extensive range of services protecting life and property, including electronic alarm systems, automobile emergency systems and equipment for the hearing impaired, just to name a few. The AMPS cellular system operates on analogue radio channels to provide cellular telephone communication services. In addition to providing ìsimpleî voice telephone calls the analogue cellular telephone network has been used to provide a multitude of ancillary communication services including the transmission of alarm signals from customer premises to signal receiving centres.

As it currently stands cellular providers in North America are planning to phase out AMPS in 2006, which CANASA would like to see moved to 2008, in order to provide the Canadian security industry with more time to complete research and development, beta field trials and replacement of the presently installed AMPS compatible signal transmission equipment, including the more than 60,000 cellular control channel radios currently in use throughout Canada.

According to David Currie, chair of CANASA's Telecommunications Committee, the decision to phase out AMPS comes down to efficiency and economics.

"In order for the cellular carriers to make the best use of the radio frequency spectrum they can, they want to phase out the analogue cellular service and replace it with digital service," he says. "For a given amount of spectrum, they can make more money if they go to digital."

A similar situation is happening south of the border, but because of the potential problems of a swift changeover to digital from analogue, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mandated cellular carriers to maintain their AMPS networks until February 2008.

Within Canada, Industry Canada allocates the frequencies, spectrum and technical aspects of communications, while the CRTC regulates the telecommunications services being provided. Currie notes that, "in the case of cellular control services on the AMPS, that is a non-regulated service" and, both the CRTC and Industry Canada, while sympathetic to the problem, cannot mandate a timeline.

CANASA is fully aware of this problem for the alarm industry and its customers and is actively pursuing avenues that include partnering with the CRTC and Industry Canada to lobby the cellular providers to adjust their AMPS schedule.

"One of the real problems is that it is very difficult for us to get any kind of firm commitment from the cellular carriers as to what they are going to do', remarks Currie, adding some of them do not even have the money to migrate their customers to digital while others want to only focus on high traffic areas. "What we really need is somebody in the cellular carriers to say, "Yes, we are going to keep this service until February, 2008."
To date, only SaskTel has made the commitment to follow the U.S. lead and postpone its AMPS phase out, while several major security product manufacturers (e.g., Honeywell and DSC) are expected to release beta products sometime in early 2006.

Currie does not foresee beta testing to be that long of a process because the alarm technology is already proven, so it is only a matter of fine-tuning the new interface. He says manufacturers will need to decide on a standard or go to tri-band or dual technology radios, just for the flexibility.

Most recently ó after expressing its concerns to cellular providers over the phasing out of AMPS ó CANASA has received replies from several of them, including Rogers Wireless, which has advised the association that it will be going forward with the decommissioning of their analogue cellular telephone network without regard for the February 2008 U.S. mandated phase out date. In fact Rogers has indicated that they have already started to take down analogue sites.

On the other hand, Bell Mobility (Ontario and Quebec) and Sasktel Mobility have advised CANASA that they will be maintaining their analogue cellular systems until at least February 2008. As yet, the remaining Canadian cellular service providers have not responded to CANASA.